Susanna

 

Today's Old Testament reading at Mass [Daniel 13] recounts the Book of Daniel's dramatic story of Susanna, set in the Jewish exile community in Babylon. The story of Susanna was a popular one in the early Church and has long been a staple of the lenten liturgy.

It tells the story of Susanna, wife of very respected Jewish elder Joakim, who is trapped by two corrupt Jewish elders who falsely accuse her of committing adultery under a tree with some unidentified young man. After Susanna is unjustly condemned to death, she calls on God, who hears her prayer and stirs up young Daniel to challenge the elders and defend Susanna's innocence. Daniel interrogates the elders separately, thereby catching them in their lie. It is a classic morality tale about how God saves those who hope in him. 

Thus was innocent blood spared that day.

Then as now, people were conscious of and alert to political corruption and the unfairness of things, thanks to some people's privileged positions. Societies - such as our own - have often prided themselves on practicing justice. In human terms, justice, judging people according to their deserts and merits rather than their wealth, status, or political power, is something we value as a great accomplishment of civilization. We compare societies by how just they are - or at least appear to be. Around the world right now, people are judging us the United States by how just or unjust we appear to be in the ways we treat one another in society, how our government treats those lacking in wealth, status, or political power.

In the Lenten liturgy, this reading has traditionally been paired with John's Gospel account of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery [John 8:1-11], which we heard yesterday. Unlike Susanna, the woman the Gospel account was presumably actually guilty and had been judged justly and condemned justly according to fair application of the law. Thanks to Jesus, the woman gets off and is told by Jesus, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on do not sin any longer.”

The point of the comparison is not to devalue justice, but to praise and glorify God's great mercy. Justice is a great thing, a great human accomplishment societies should aspire to and be proud of. But, as Portia says in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice: "In the course of justice, none of us should see salvation." When it comes to what we need the most, mercy outranks justice any time.

Homily for Monday of the Fifth Week of Lent, Saint Paul the Apostle, NY, April 7, 2025.

Fight: The 2024 Election Relived

 

After the shock of the Trump's victory in the 2016 election, journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign. The authors covered the campaign primarily through "background" interviews and a commitment to wait until after the election to go in print. Now that Trump has done it again, so have the authors. Their latest account is Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House (Harper Collins, 2025).

Fight focuses on the story as it played out in the aftermath of the disastrous Biden-Trump debate in June 2024.  The first - and by far most interesting part of the book - covers what, for lack of a better word, can be called the coup that removed Biden from the top of the Democratic ticket. Clearly the authors think that Biden decisively damaged Democrats' chances, first, by irresponsibly deciding to run for a second term, and, then, by resisting removal from the ticket for weeks following the debate debacle. The book highlights the intra-party conflicts that led to Biden's stepping aside, especially the role of Democratic heavyweights like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, whose personal relationships with Biden deteriorated dramatically as a result. The book also highlights the role of money in American presidential campaigns, the decisive significance ascribed to the way donors's money started to dry up in the aftermath of Biden's poor debate performance. Fight illustrates how Kamala Harris deftly and successfully moved quickly to win the nomination (despite opposition from Pelosi and Obama), but was unable ever really to overcome the factors working against her chances of winning, not least the widespread impression that she never articulated very well her reason for running. The book highlights how Harris successfully maneuvered Biden into endorsing her, but also suggests that Biden's endorsement also reflected his resentment of Obama, who had supported Clinton over Biden in 2016.

The book does not neglect the Trump campaign, but its beginning point precludes coverage of Trump's re-ascent from his post-January 6 nadir. We get coverage of the political maneuvering within the Trump campaign, how well the Trump campaign was actually managed, the assassination attempt and its effects on the campaign, the selection of J.D. Vance as Trump's running mate, and, of course, Trump's effective outreach to low-propensity voters and use of new social media. Obviously, these are important and interesting topics. But overwhelmingly, at least to this reader, what this book highlights most is the Biden-Harris story, and the "gaslighting" that the authors believe best describes the Democratic party's 2024 story - "gaslighting," first, about Biden's apparent decline, and, "gaslighting," then, about the prospects for Harris to win. As someone who had come to believe, by the end of the campaign, that Harris had a realistic chance of winning, I really appreciated the convincing way the authors demonstrate how very poor her chances really were.

This "gaslighting" theme inevitably highlights how dysfunctional the Democratic party's leadership became in 2024. "Democrats tried to break Donald Trump. Instead, they shattered again. They said they were saving the country the presidency, and the Congress from Trump and his MAGA movement. They saved nothing, not even themselves. Democrats lost everything, including their friendships."

Greenland Isn't Green

 

Most people probably already know that Greenland isn't green. But, if he didn't know it already, Vice President Vance presumably knows that now, after his chilly reception in Greenland. It was chilly in the literal sense. (Greenland is a cold place.) It was, perhaps more importantly, chilly in a metaphorical sense, in that the Vances had to scale back their plans because no local Greenlanders could be found who wanted to host them.

Greenland isn't green. Much of it is glacier-covered. It is no accident, then, that the King of Denmark's Coat of Arms includes a polar bear to represent his sovereignty over Greenland.  Recently, since the American threat to Greenland has become something to be reckoned with, Denmark's King revised his coat of arms to give Greenland's polar bear bigger space in a heraldic quadrant all its own. On can compare the older (on the left) and the newer (on the right) versions of the Danish royal coat of arms (above).

Of course, to a grifter, Greenland might appear green in a very different sense. There are natural resources there to be exploited and hence money to be made. And one thing America never seems to lack are Americans ready to exploit natural resources, regardless of the harm to the common good and to our common home. 

Greenland's location in the north Atlantic makes it significant for American and European security. But Greenland (via Denmark) is part of NATO, the north Atlantic's surest source of security, and the U.S. already has a military base on Greenland, guarding the sea lanes and the arctic air. For its part, Denmark has been a very loyal ally of the United States, actively supporting us in peace and war.

There are not a lot of Greenlanders. They are a very small nation, suddenly experiencing the classic bad behavior of great powers pushing their smaller neighbors around (as we have witnessed most extremely in the case of Russia's 2022 invasion of its smaller neighbor Ukraine). It appears that some, maybe many, local Greenlanders would like independence. If I were a Greenlander, I would probably prefer to remain Danish, with Danish and European Union social benefits and NATO's security umbrella. Denmark does, after all, repeatedly rank as one of the happiest countries in the world. But that is ultimately up to the Greenlanders and the Danes to sort out. Whatever Greenland's future, it should be the business of Greenlanders and Danes to determine.

The Last Supper (The Movie)

 

I have not fully followed The Chosen, the first-ever multi-season TV series about the life of Christ. I have watched just a few episodes from the first season. But yesterday I went to the theater to see the latest episode, The Chosen; The Last Supper, Part 1. 

The series itself has gotten great reviews. From what I have heard from others who have followed it more faithfully, for the little I have seen myself, and finally from watching this in-theater episode, it is certainly impressive. The series is beautifully filmed, conveying a real feel for what the world of the New Testament - at that very specific place and time must have been like. It illustrates first-century Jewish life, which we Christians need to appreciate as much as possible. It also illustrates what kind of dramatic affect Jesus had on people's lives, people whose lives which until then had been otherwise ordinary but were suddenly being dramatically challenged to transformation through their experience of and relationship with Jesus.

As I remarked in regard to the current series House of David, one of the problems with dramatizing biblical narratives is that there is a lot of space to fill in with what must inevitably be made-up events, stories, and even characters. In the case of House of David, the downside of this is evident in the effort and amount of fictionalization required required to fill eight episodes with only three chapters of the biblical account. The latest episode seemed totally like a forced attempt to make up enough to fill in the time so as to get in one more episode. I haven't seen enough of The Chosen to be certain that this series avoids that pitfall. What I have seen suggests it is doing a more interesting job of filling in the spaces between actual biblical events.

That said, The Last Supper, Part 1, is really more about the first few days of Holy Week than about the Last Supper itself, which is only shown in intermittent excerpts of Jesus' Last Supper Discourse. The highlights of the evening (e.g., the foot washing, the Eucharist) are presumably being saved for a later episode. Instead of the Last Supper itself, this movie is about the triumphal entry into the city on Palm Sunday and the cleansing of the Temple (which the Gospels suggest occurred right away, but which the movie makes happen a day or two later). Both are well dramatized, and both are preceded and followed by fictionalized events that seem intended obviously to fit in with the bigger events and help interpret them (for example, the Gentiles from the Decapolis perplexed reaction to the Temple commerce and their wonder what Jesus would think of it).

This is the season for biblical dramas - especially passion plays. The Chosen; The Last Supper seems to do a better than average job of filling that niche of seasonal expectation, with something that definitely invites us to put ourselves into the story and imagine personally how Jesus' activities impacted his surroundings and what they are meant to mean for us today.

Abundance (The Book)

 

Ezra Klein is a well known NY Times political columnist and podcaster, originally from California, now based in Brooklyn, and author of Why We're Polarized (2020). Derek Thompson is an Atlantic staff writer and also a podcaster. The two have teamed up to produce Abundance (Simon and Schuster, 2025).

Abundance is dedicated to what its authors consider a simple idea, but which they and we know to be actually a quite controversial one, that "to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need." They oppose this to a 21st-century American "story of chosen scarcities." Thus agenda transcends the 20th-century political dichotomy between "a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it."

As anyone familiar with the way these issues have come to be framed recognizes, this book is a conversation largely within the progressive left. It expresses "the anger any liberal should feel when looking at the states and cities liberals govern." California, for example, "has the worst homelessness problem in the country. It has the worst hosing affordability problem in the country. It trails only Hawaii and Massachusetts in its cost of living. As a result, it is losing hundreds of thousands of people every year to Texas and Arizona." The authors also highlight the consequent effect ineffective progressive misgovernment in such places has had electorally - in the form of the rise of populist Trumpism.

In their argument for a retrieval of growth politics, the authors take on the misanthropic antigrowth politics that they see as having developed somewhat in tandem with the environmental movement and related quality-of-life concerns in the last 50-60 years.  Back then, the rising anti-growth ideologies sometimes attacked Christianity. Here. the authors rebut that attack. They call degrowth "an anti-materialist philosophy that holds that humanity made its fundamental errors, hundreds of years ago, trading the animism of our ancestors for Christianity's promise of dominion over nature."

The book gos into great detail illustrating the ways in which liberal preoccupations with process have frustrated and stunted the outcomes liberals ought to have been seeking. I live in New York City, a city that once epitomized what America could build. Imagine anyone trying to build the Empire State building in just a year today? Let alone trying to build enough housing for everyone who wants to live here?

But the authors believe that this may be one of those rare periods in our national history, "when the decline of one political order makes space for another." They recall how the New Deal political order arose in the 1930s and then collapsed in the 1970s, to be replaced by the neo-liberal order which has been fracturing under the weight of the Great Recession, the climate crisis, the pandemic, and "our interlocking crises of scarcity, supply, and unaffordability." In such times of transition, "ideas once regarded as implausible and unacceptable become possible and even inevitable."

So is it time for such a retrieved politics of abundance? The authors see the politics of scarcity  in the currently reigning right-wing populism, which "seeks power by closing doors, halting change, and venerating the businesses and dominance hierarchies of the past. So too is the sense that governments today are weak and corrupt and, therefore, that strongmen are needed to see the world clearly and deliver on democracy's failed promises." Meanwhile, however, Blue America remains stuck in its own scarcity politics. The authors' argument is that, given the right's abandonment of its many successes (e.g., the Texas housing market, Operation Warp Speed) in order to embrace a politics of scarcity, there may now be room for liberals to embrace the politics of abundance that Republicans have abandoned.

This is a very thoughtful and provocative book. It is hard to contest its data. But diagnosing where we have historically gone wrong is always easier than producing the political solution that may be needed. At present, the left lacks political power, without which little can be accomplished. To acquire power - and to use it effectively in our present predicament - require a kind of liberal "strongman," a liberal anti-Trump, an FDR for the 21st century, who can coalesce a new coalition that can be led to embrace not just more of the same, but a new political order, responsive to the new challenges of the present. Whether the current opposition party can rise to that challenge remains yet to be seen.